The Poetry Society Announces the Shortlist for the Ted Hughes Award For
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PRESS RELEASE 5 March 2013 For immediate release The Poetry Society announces the shortlist for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry Baskin of Leonard © Estate Crow The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry seeks to recognise excellence in poetry, highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life. Established in 2009 by Carol Ann Duffy, the £5,000 prize is funded with the annual honorarium the Poet Laureate traditionally receives from HM The Queen. The award is one of the only prizes to acknowledge the wide range of collaborative work being produced by poets – not just in books, but beyond. Artist Cornelia Parker joins poets Ian Duhig and Maura Dooley on the judging panel this year. Selecting from a wide range of work across all media, the judges have chosen a shortlist of seven poets. The final winner will be announced at an awards reception in London on 27 March 2013. “Shortlisting for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry was a simultaneously exhilarating and heartbreaking process: the former, because so much of the work we saw was of a terrifically high standard; the latter, because there was so much of merit that we had to leave off the shortlist. We favoured work that was moving away from the usual formulae and the good news is that there is a lot of original poetry being written in these islands today.”– Ian Duhig, Judge The following poets have been shortlisted for the Award, for new poetry presented in the UK during 2012: Colette Bryce, Roy Fisher, Ruth Padel, Mario Petrucci, Denise Riley, Kate Tempest and Tamar Yoseloff, Colette Bryce for Ballasting the Ark Poem-films produced by poet Colette Bryce, working in collaboration with artist Kate Sweeney, as part of her Leverhulme residency at the Dove Marine Laboratory, Cullercoats ; and accompanying short book of poems published by Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. Bryce’s work responds to the location of the laboratory, the creatures of its flow-through seawater aquaria, and strands of science such as ballast water treatment and Colette Bryce. offshore wind turbine technology. Photo: Phyllis Christopher Continues over For further information The Poetry Society, Page 1 of 3 Telephone Robyn Donaldson 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX on 020 7420 9886 or email Tel: 020 7420 9880 Fax: 020 7240 4818 [email protected] www.poetrysociety.org.uk Poetry Society Press Release ctd For immediate release Roy Fisher for Locklines Roy Fisher has written a series of elliptical short poems for Hillmorton Locks, installed on the Oxford Canal, near Rugby, as part of the Locklines project. Sculptor Peter Coates designed, carved and inlaid the lines of poetry onto green oak lock gate beams, created for locations requiring replacement gates this winter. Fisher has also written for Farmer’s Bridge Lock, Birmingham. Locklines is produced by Chrysalis Arts as part of a wider Roy Fisher. Photo: partnership between the Canal & River Trust and Arts Council England in association with the Poetry Society. Jemimah Kuhfeld Ruth Padel for The Mara Crossing In ninety varied poems, interwoven with illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel’s original book weaves science, myth, wild nature and human history to conjure a world created and sustained by migration. The Mara Crossing (published by Chatto & Windus) explores the ways in which we are all ‘from somewhere else’. Ruth Padel Mario Petrucci for Tales from the Bridge Commissioned by the Mayor of London, Tales from the Bridge was the world’s largest 3D poetry soundscape, launched on the River Thames as a centrepiece for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Mario Petrucci's innovative poetry script for two voices was built into a haunting score composed by Martyn Ware (in collaboration with artistic director David Bickerstaff), to create a full-immersion poetic experience spanning London’s Millennium Mario Petrucci Bridge. Encompassing the history, geology and economic functions of the river, alongside its local life and metaphorical potencies, the poem bears witness to the enduring role of the Thames as the city's lyrical, silty heart. Denise Riley for A Part Song Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’ is an elegy or lamentation in different modes, written in response to the death of the poet’s son. A sequence in twenty sections, it first appeared in the London Review of Books and publication was accompanied by a podcast of Riley reading the poem. Denise Riley Kate Tempest for Brand New Ancients An hour-long spoken story told over a live orchestral score, Brand New Ancients tells the tale of two families as they intertwine and collide, all set against the epic back drop of mythology and the city. Kate Tempest's touring show was produced in partnership with Battersea Arts Centre, with a score composed by Nell Catchpole in collaboration with and performed by Kwake Bass, Raven Bush, Natasha Zielazinski and Jo Gibson. Kate Tempest. Photo: Wavey Davey Tamar Yoseloff for Formerly Formerly is a collaborative exhibition by Tamar Yoseloff and Vici MacDonald commemorating forgotten corners of a London now fast disappearing. Yoseloff has written a cycle of fourteen irregular and anarchic sonnets, created in response to MacDonald’s grainy photographs of superannuated shop fronts, council estates and industrial sites. The show premiered at the Poetry Café and has toured to the Poetry Library. Tamar Yoseloff. Photo: Derek Adams – ENDS – For further information, please contact Robyn Donaldson on 020 7420 9886, or email [email protected] Notes to Editors continues over For further information The Poetry Society, Page 2 of 3 Telephone Robyn Donaldson 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX on 020 7420 9886 or email Tel: 020 7420 9880 Fax: 020 7240 4818 [email protected] www.poetrysociety.org.uk Poetry Society Press Release ctd For immediate release Notes to Editors: TED HUGHES AWARD JUDGES: Maura Dooley’s most recent Ian Duhig has written six Cornelia Parker received an collection of poetry is Life books of poetry, most recently OBE and was elected to the Under Water (Bloodaxe 2008). Pandorama (Picador 2010). Royal Academy of Arts in 2010. She has edited anthologies He has also worked with She was nominated for the of verse and essays, including artists, historians, film makers Turner Prize in 1997. A major The Honey Gatherers: Love and homeless people as well publication on her work will Maura Dooley Poems (Bloodaxe 2003) and Ian Duhig as a range of musicians, Cornelia Parker be published by Thames & Photo: David Hunter How Novelists Work (Seren from the pre-baroque consort The Clerks to Hudson in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include 2000). She has worked with new writers the contemporary avant-garde composer Thirty Pieces of Silver at York St Mary’s (in consistently, with the Arvon Foundation, Christopher Fox. He has won a Forward Prize, association with Tate) in 2011, and Doubtful Performing Arts Labs, the Southbank Centre, the National Poetry Competition twice and been Sound at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Jim Henson Film and currently Goldsmiths shortlisted three times for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Art in 2010. Locations of forthcoming solo College, University of London. She has twice exhibitions include the Frith Street Gallery, been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and is London, in 2013 and the Whitworth Art Gallery, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Manchester, in 2014. TED HUGHES AWARD SHORTLISTED POETS: • Colette Bryce is an Irish poet currently based in the North East of England. Her collections include The Full Indian Rope Trick (Picador, 2004) and Self-Portrait in the Dark (2008). She won the National Poetry Competition in 2003 and received the Cholmondeley Award for her poetry in 2010. From 2009 until recently she was Poetry Editor at Poetry London. • Roy Fisher has published over thirty poetry books, and has been the subject of numerous critical essays and several studies, including The Unofficial Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books, 2010). His four collections with Bloodaxe include The Dow Low Drop: New & Selected Poems (1996), and his later retrospective, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 (2005). His most recent collection, Standard Midland (2010), published on his eightieth birthday, was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. Born in 1930 in Handsworth, Birmingham, he retired as Senior Lecturer in American Studies from Keele University in 1982. He is a freelance writer and jazz musician, and lives in Derbyshire. • Ruth Padel has published eight collections, four shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot, Forward or Costa Prizes. Highly acclaimed for her nature writing in her novel, Where the Serpent Lives, and her memoir of tiger conservation, Tigers in Red Weather, she also writes and presents BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Workshop. Her awards include a British Council Darwin Now research award, and First Prize in the National Poetry Competition. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and on the Council of the Zoological Society of London. • Mario Petrucci – Winner of the Bridport Prize, the London Writers Competition (four times) and a PBS Recommendation, Mario Petrucci has long been a poetry frontiersman, holding pioneering residencies at the Imperial War Museum and BBC Radio 3. Science and ecology deeply inform his work. Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl (Enitharmon, 2004) captured the Arvon Prize and became an award-winning international film. His uniquely-voiced, 1111-strong Anglo-American sequence, i tulips, delivers “a truly ambitious landmark body of work” (PBS Bulletin). • Denise Riley published War in the Nursery: Theories of Child and Mother (1983); ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of Women in History (1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); The Force of Language, with J.-J.